“This is an extremely dangerous precedent,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of the Labor Center at UC Berkeley. “They just acted like the law doesn’t apply to them and assumed they could bring in enough money, gain enough political power, to bend the law to their will.”
Prioritizing good jobs that also solve some of our environmental and climate issues are part of a strong economic recovery. We’re at a crossroads. The recommendations in the Jobs and Climate Action Plan for 2030 will help California emerge from this recovery stronger and more resilient than ever.
Nearly 21,000 essential workers wouldn’t have contracted COVID-19 and dozens likely wouldn’t have died if California had an adequate stockpile of personal protective equipment at the outset of the pandemic, according to a Wednesday report from UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and Labor Center.
If the drivers had been classified as employees, Uber and Lyft would have paid $413 million into California’s unemployment fund between 2014 and 2019, a recent report from UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment found. That’s about the same amount of money as California borrowed from the federal government in April to pay a staggering number of unemployment claims.
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